In the case of Guy Gagnon's images the subject, at least to me, is the contemplation and celebration of the remarkable forms that nature can conjure. Seeing "death" is an interesting reaction.[/QUOTE
Ken,
By contrast to Guy Gagnon's work, in this picture, Jim Galli has caught an apparition of a broad leaf, a ghost floating before out eyes through which disorder of the curving linear forms is seen. If you have held a lens in front of an illuminated eye and se en a virtual retina spread before you, then this experience is what I feel when looking at Jim Galli's picture.
Photo Jim Galli fern & spider grass
His work, as such (when one cannot perfectly see hat was happening upside down and has to compromise on focus, then what one gets on film, thus exposed), is like what one finds walking on a beach, "found art". In the end, it's choosing as best as one can from many pieces of accidental driftwood and bringing one home.
Contemplation hopefully occurs when
we seek to find meaning in that selected form. As potential art, it likely functions far differently from a work made with a more focused and thoroughly planned passion. It does not cause a
replaying of planned emotions as experienced by the artist. Rather it allows the viewer to enter a novel universe. There one's own libraries of experience, ideas and emotions are allowed to open up and explore possibilities in a different setting. So the artist's job is to create such places of wonder and mystery for us to populate with our own ideation. Such art then has a unique and wonderful function for humanity. There, I posit, art serves as a "Gymnasium for the mind", not necessarily containing anything of an "Arc of Communication" by the artist. In the latter, which I originally thought was essential to all art, does occur when an artist engraves premeditated creations in a 2 dimensional composition. Their the work is mostly defined by the artist. Here, by contrast, with Jim's current 4x5 photograph, (as with driftwood returned from the beach), it's
our experience we bring top the piece that makes it work! It seems that a "found" specimen is chosen as "Found Art" because it has qualities that allow indefined space to accommodate thoughts that we the observer bring.
Now there is no piece of art that is
only narrative, full of beauty, has meaning, evokes passion or just serves to allow us to test our own imagination or givens in life. Art contains dabs of this and that! Similarly our education, personalities and openness varies. So that accounts for diverse reactions to Jim Galli's photograph.
There's a transient transparency of one broad leaf to allows the disorder and even untidiness of the more ancient grasses to be seen through and below it. Despite being far apart by evolution, they still can dance together with Jim's antique lenses.
You may think this is rationalization romancing chance nonsense and perhaps it's just an expression of my own disorder, but right now, I want a print. I may hate myself in the morning!
Asher